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Three universities in France made the top 100 in the the annual Shanghai Ranking published on Monday.

Harvard University remains the world's best university for the 14th year, on a list dominated by American universities. Two British universities, Cambridge and Oxford, also make the top ten alongside US powerhouses Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and Princeton.

Among the top French performers, the Pierre and Marie Curie University ranked 39th, Paris Sud came in at 46th, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure finished at 87th.

Other top performers for France were Aix Marseille University, the University of Strasbourg, and the University of Paris Diderot, all of which were ranked between 101st and 150th.

France had 22 universities in the list, more in total than all but five other countries, the US, China, Germany, the UK, and Australia.

The Shanghai Ranking, compiled by the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, examines the performance of 12,000 universities worldwide.

It rates universities according to a formula based on the number of articles they have published in prestigious academic journals, the number of highly-cited researchers working there, the number of Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals (in mathematics) won and the per-capita academic performance of each institution.